GroupMe Spends Some of Its Millions on Stickers

Cash-rich local startup GroupMe has decided it’s time to plaster stickers everywhere.

Remember the sticker-centric publicity stunt by Facebook game-maker Zynga in August? (See Farmville Makers Inspire Lower East Side Vendetta.) Zynga stickered sidewalks with fake cash and windows with fake bullet holes to promote the game Mafia Wars, pissing off bloggers who called it “littering.”

Now GroupMe, a New York startup that has developed a way to save lists for group text messaging from any phone, looks to be doing something similar.

GroupMe raised $9 million last month from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and First Round Capital, among others. The company has apparently used some of that money for “thousands of stickers:”

Keep an eye out for them in the wild-you never know where they’re going to pop up.

If you want a few to help us spread the word, we’d love to send you some.

Ominous. If you’re interested in making some city maintenance workers’ lives harder, instructions for getting free stickers are on GroupMe’s blog.

UPDATE: Steve Spillman, community manager at GroupMe, writes in to clarify that GroupMe has nothing but love for city maintenance workers and “currently has no plans to vandalize anything… what I meant is that people are putting them on their phones and computers and notebooks and laptop bags–not on stop signs, god forbid.”